


Hawking Radiation

by justbygrace



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon verse, Dark, F/M, Happy Ending, Non-Explicit Description of Masturbation, Non-Explicit Sex, Slight Undercurrent of BDSM Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 14:27:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13977036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbygrace/pseuds/justbygrace
Summary: "The existence of Hawking radiation also implies that black holes can eventually wither away and die, something that had previously been inconceivable to scientists."I read that excerpt in an article talking about Stephen Hawking's life and I was inspired.Dedicated to Stephen Hawking, a true man of the stars.





	Hawking Radiation

They didn't talk about it. Sometimes she thought she wanted to, sometimes she thought they should, sometimes she even thought _he_ wanted to, but they never did. 

It happened the first time after the dalek and Adam and a day that brought home the dark side of traveling in time and space. Back then she was young and needy and entranced by this glorious man from space and didn't really know what she was getting in to. At first she rather thought he needed the distraction of a warm body and the mutual release that came from the distinctly human passions they engaged in. After that it became a habit, a way to relieve stress, and a way to communicate that didn't involve the words that he was notoriously bad at and she was growing loathe to use. 

With her first Doctor it was easy, almost. Easy to lose herself in the moment, in the feel of his body against hers, the ebb and flow of the oldest dance in the universe. He expressed his emotions, his feelings, his need and desire and, yes, his love for her in the way they moved against each other in the dark, in the light, in her bed, in his, against the console, on a bed in a cottage after a particularly dangerous adventure. He was too old and she was too young to put a name on what they were doing - it was just an exercise, a routine, and a delightful pastime. Sometimes, much later, she thought if they'd continued to travel with Jack he would have been invited to join the ritual, but that interlude was over almost before it started.

They didn't dive right back into it after Bad Wolf and the Sycorax, though she thought they would. The new Doctor was easy and loose in a way her old one had never been, but that false front hid a mountain of hurt her first had worn on the cuff. It took days, weeks, more than a passing adventure before they came together. Even then it wasn't the easy familiarity they'd once shared. This was hard and quick and desperate, teeth and tongues and dominance that flip-flopped depending on emotions and who needed what the most.

And emotions were the fulcrum upon which their need balanced. Her emotions, his, twining and rising and falling, fighting for the edge, for the little bit more that neither of them knew how to give anymore. Sometimes, after they'd spent themselves, she would think about the differences, how the easy synchronization she had shared with her first Doctor was at odds with his personality and the sometimes-painful passions of her second belied his seemingly easy-going demeanor.

Towards the end it became more volatile, this coming together they did. They dared each other in words and actions, growing bolder as the storm grew in intensity. In a spaceship that orbited a black hole but never fell in they made love in a narrow bunk with the members of the crew on the other side, on a quiet London street after an Olympics celebration they fucked against a brick wall, in a bustling marketplace on a far-distant planet she dropped to her knees when a gust of wind could have shown their deed to the world. Behind closed doors they pushed their boundaries to the edge, finding the limits of pain and tolerance and love while wrapped up in the business of not speaking about anything worth saying.

By that point she'd gotten as good as he was in burying her feelings in a few well-placed thrusts and if the sheets grew wet from more than just their passion, well, no one was there to witness it except themselves. She held his hand now with the same bruising intensity he'd once gripped hers in a basement in another lifetime and her teeth left scars on his skin in the dark. Afterwards, when the cruel walls of the universe slammed shut she thought of those marks with a grim satisfaction, knowing the bruises would take days, weeks to heal and that he would see them, would touch them and think of her. 

She threw herself into the discovery of dimension canons with a single-minded focus and came apart in the darkness of her room to muffled cries of his name and the furious movement of her own hand, memories of her Doctors faces merged into one as their hands and mouths ravished her body. Pete gave her a wide berth and Jackie offered hugs and an understanding smile and the Torchwood Agents saluted her in the halls and ducked out of her way and sometimes she didn't know whether to laugh or cry or scream and sometimes she did all three at once. 

It never would have worked if the stars hadn't started to go out and there was a cruel irony in that which she remembered when she bit down on her pillow rather than wake the house with the force of her orgasms. Somehow, against all the odds, she was certain she was succumbing to passion at the same time as the strange Lord of the Stars and it was to his memory that she bucked against her hand tangled in sweaty sheets, or, when she needed to refocus, in the stall of the ladies room at Torchwood.

She found him again and almost instantly lost him to the same creature that had originally brought them together and, if there had been the time, she would have tattooed her hatred of irony into his skin. But there wasn't time because there wasn't ever enough, not with this slippery fickle immortal being for whom she had jumped across universes, and when she found herself standing on a cold beach with two versions of him she chose the one who would calm her, not the one who would rile her up further. She was ready for something new.

The Doctor of the original universe had called this new Doctor a man born of blood and anger and revenge and when Rose stared at him she could see herself shining back and when they came together that first evening in Pete's World it wasn't a gentle lovemaking. It took days, weeks, months, even years to settle. To work themselves backwards from pain and rage and desperation into something gentler, easier, consistent. To find the solace they'd been searching for in a life spent on the slow path, in fucking against kitchen cabinets, in shagging in out-of-the-way meadows, in making love in countries where neither of them could speak the language, in discovering new limits but with a mutual understanding of each other, in burying themselves so far into the other person they couldn't tell where one began and the other ended.

They talked about it now. They talked about the years they'd spent together and the years they'd spent apart, about the flashes of fury that would overtake them, about the sadness and the inability to do anything but silently seethe at an unfeeling universe, about the joy they were finding in this life, in each other, in a mutual forever.


End file.
